17.04.2026 | Live Score | DEMENTIA (US 1955, John Parker) & THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413: A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (US 1928, Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich)
DEMENTIA
US 1955, D: John Parker, 56‘, no dialogue, DCP
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413. A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA
US 1928, D: Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich, 13‘, silent, DCP
After our evenings with the experimental landscapes and puppet worlds of SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE and BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING, we at GEGENkino meets Kinoorgel are delighted to put your viewing and listening habits to the test for the third time. While previous Kinoorgel performances have combined contemporary cinema with time-honoured cultural practices from the silent film era, this time we are actually going back to the production period of the 1920s, then spanning the arc to the 1950s. Musically, we are also dealing with a ‘double feature’: organist Anja Kleinmichel will be joined by Lutz Eitel on electric guitar and samplers to live score John Parker’s DEMENTIA (1955) and Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413. A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (1928).
An evening dedicated to American avant-garde and neo-avant-garde cinema, as well as nightmarish genre films: dimly lit alleys, cast shadows, dreamlike leaps in time and place, threatening cityscapes and landscapes of the soul that no longer convey a clear narrative, acting that, in its jerky and abrupt manner, leaves no pathos untouched and reaches directly out of the screen. In short: a world that seems to have fallen apart in form and content.
This is what connects both films of the evening, which are visibly influenced by European expressionism and surrealism of the 1910s and 1920s. The rarely shown THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413. A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA (1928) revolves around the world of Hollywood, more precisely around a man who seeks his fortune there as an actor but instead ends up as a nameless extra. A grotesque film essay that oscillates between satire and formal experimentation, it also anticipates the horrific worlds that director Robert Florey would create a little later in his adaptation of Poe’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932).
Also residing in the horror genre is DEMENTIA, a film composed without dialogue, which was initially banned in 1953 by the New York Film Board for being the ‘quintessence of gruesomeness’ due to its portrayal of female violence, which was perceived as sensationalist, which quickly fell into oblivion after its release. Such a protagonist was too much for the film market at the time: In the film, she wakes up at night and roams through Hollywood, haunted by the trauma of her past – another parallel to the previous film. But the present is also precarious. Shady men, figures straight out of the underworld, loiter on the streets and threaten her; the Hollywood Tribune reports a ‘mysterious stabbing’. She rides with a rich man in a limousine to his hotel room, where an éclat ensues. What fuels the heroine’s violent fantasies?
Incidentally, his only directing credit, John Parker stages DEMENTIA, which he also produced, like a nightmare, as a woodcut-like flow of images that seems to be heading towards a terrible finale. In the original, the music of avant-garde composer George Antheil provides a menacing soundtrack. We are very excited to see whether the performers Anja Kleinmichel and Lutz Eitel will follow suit, or whether they will take us on a completely different journey through horror noir Hollywood.
| Sun 17 April | Grassi Museum Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität Leipzig |
| 7:30 PM | Live Score by Anja Kleinmichel and Lutz Eitel Entry fee: 12€ (reduced: 10€) Tickets at tixforgigs |
